A goddess on the mountaintop was burning like a silver flame
Black as the dark night she was, and Venus was her name. “Venus”, Shocking Blue.

Buffalo Gals is highly cinematic, with its rapid changes in magnificent scenery and colourful indoor locations such as Heron Court, Gigiri and Palais des Nations. 

Perhaps it will become a movie. If so, it is usual to provide a summary of the major characters for a cinematic treatment, and I have begun this process. 

Although the Buffalo Gals are based on real people, they are also archetypes –a pantheon of rather perverse and compelling goddesses. 

Njoki

 Njoki is for me one of the great characters, as she embodies so many contradictions. She feels from an early age that she is special, not the norm. But she is born poor with no education or advantages, though she is an avid reader. This leads her to construct multiple alternate personas for herself, including an educated elder sister in Germany who sends her dresses for a shop. What she did find in Germany was much more unpleasant – a lonely obese German man whose mother hated blacks and sent her packing.

Public shame is a terrible thing for Njoki. She has to be the best and have the highest status. She needs to wear the best clothes, to do “swimming laps”, to shout men a beer, She wants to be a white girl – which puts Jack right off, because he is not looking for one. 

Njoki has a superpower. She has managed to establish herself as “Mama Haraka”, Mama Juju, the best pick-up artist in town who scores all the best men and then leaves them heartbroken. 

It is hard to know why Jack behaves so far out of character in taking her back to the hotel on their first meeting. He says it is a mistake, because of the beer and his disorientation. But perhaps Jack also senses something far above the ordinary in Njoki. Under different circumstances, Jack feels Njoki might have been a leader of her people.

If not for her lying and her occupation, she and Jack would have a good relationship based on mutual lust and companionship. But Jack’s distaste for Njoki accelerates the more she cheats, though he can’t leave her because of her erotic power. Njoki resents Jack’s attempts to control her and make her into the “nice African girl” he originally thought, rather than “the devil”. She prefers Tony who has not discovered her duplicity, believing he will marry her. To Njoki, this is the only way she can leave the bar behind, becoming an “important woman” like her “friends” Lizzy and Gianna.

Many Africans are highly racist about someone or other. In Njoki's case it is Indians. She refuses to sit on the bus with a group of Indians, or to sit opposite a little Indian girl at dinner. She is not alone - Maggie hates Luos; the Kikuyus look down on everyone except whites, and everyone else thinks the Kikuyus are uppity crooks..     

As a trickster Njoki is greatly accomplished. Although Jack knows what she is and knows about Tony, she cheats Jack for money in fairly complex ways to obtain the fare to Florida. She is so keen to join Tony that she never questions why he does not send her the fare, only a few bedsheets she can sell. And so she loses everything, and is forced back to the slums and roadside bars.

Njoki’s jealousy is most peculiar. She is completely promiscuous herself, but explodes in anger if some other woman comes onto her territory. This is not because of the possible loss of income: money is not her primary driver. It means she is “shamed” in the bar because her boyfriend is a “butterfly”. It almost seems to involve the desecration of her juju, her female magic. 

But Njoki cannot be simply written off as “the devil”, a swindler and whore, because beneath all the damage. she has an innate goodness She really tries to give her little son Charlie a better life. She takes up a collection for injured Gladys and stays with her in hospital. She always carries food for the street children scavenging in bins. She wants to go to Goma to help the Hutu refugees, and is indignant about their plight. 

It turns out that despite cheating Jack so badly, Njoki really wants to impress him and to do good. Once she loses everything, she volunteers to work at a religious not for profit and changes her life, becoming a Mary Magdalen figure.

Maggie

Maggie is another complex character. She is half Turkana, a partly trained nurse who occasionally takes jobs caring for the ill. She iws very intelligent, full of information about everything. She and Jack wisecrack to each other whenever they meet, keeping each other laughing. Her mother is Turkana, and she is the eldest of five girls, each with a different father. Even more than Njoki, she is trying to give her son a “proper education”. She shares one of the small units surrounding the Heron Court square, next to the hotel.

Maggie is annoyed because Njoki “stole” Jack at their first meeting. She is jealous of Njoki’s good fortune and her “allowance”. First she blows Njoki’s cover, telling Jack that Njoki is “the biggest prostitute in Nairobi”. Then she tries to seduce Jack. Jack lets her fail so she will get over her outbreak of envy and spread the word that “Jack can’t do it with hookers”. Njoki then gives Maggie a “piece of her mind” and Maggie changes hotels. But Maggie and Njoki have a sneaking regard for each other, as the Alpha females of the bar.

According to Njoki, “That Maggie, they do not like her here. She thinks she is better than everyone else, more clever. Just because she is a nurse. If she is so clever, why is she hanging round here? She is just another drunk.” 

Much later, Jack pays for Maggie to do a travel agent course. With Njoki gone, he needs someone else. He now feels friendly enough with Maggie and asks her to come home, but she refuses because “now he is a friend”. And that is true, Maggie really is his friend.

Gladys

Gladys is sad and self-destructive but also innocent and wild. Her great tragedy is that she was “left at the orphanage in a cellophane bag”. The nuns turned her into a “champion cook” and she maintains her bedsit on Heron Court impeccably. She features in the Lonely Planet Guide, and is famous for having drunk the Maralal Camel Derby dry and for having entertained the father of the murdered photographer, Julie Ward, on one of his many investigative visits. 

Gladys will say anything and do anything and is punished for it, as the inevitable victim. She is beaten up with stiletto heels after a bucks party and raped by a group of men in a taxi. 

Jack is kind to her and she develops a crush on him, as she has “never had a boyfriend”. After her birthday party she and her best friends go back to Jack’s new place for a singalong and other diversions.

She dies of Aids and her baby is taken away by a woman in a limousine.

Mumbi

Gentle Mumbi loves nature and the arts, and is very passionate. She promotes Kenyan artifacts, selling them from pop-up shops, and exporting direct from artifact factories to help the craftspeople. All her siblings were professionals, but university was closed during a prolonged academic strike period, so she was never able to enrol. 

She had an ardent affair with Trevor, a young American who is an inveterate African traveller. They marry and have two little girls. Trevor is shamed when he fails his PhD and has to go home to work as a research assistant. He does not return for years  

Mumbi’s father ran Kenya Power and her mother had a 14 acre farm on the edge of town. As the youngest girl, she was her father’s little princess. After witnessing her father murdered at the front door in what appeared to be a political purge of senior Kikuyus, she had a severe shock and disappeared for many months.

Maggie introduces Mumbi to Jack at Buffalo Bills as someone who can help him send artifacts to Jack’s sponsor Rod Silver in Canada. Jack is immediately overwhelmed with her vivaciousness and pays her instant attention, until a roadbuilding friend intervenes, explaining she is a married woman with two children.

Jack visits Mumbi’s farm where the Australian plants and the children ease Jack’s overwhelming homesickness. Eventually they become lovers and travel together to the Kenya coast, Ethiopia and Yemen. She introduces him to her middle-class friends and their places. He starts his music group Umoja, co-managed with Mumbi. They say a sad goodbye and go to their spouses. However, both primary relationships are disturbed by their affair, and eventually break up. Nearly 20 years later Jack and Mumbi marry.